Okay so wanting your input on the one eye point. I am guilty of this technique as well. So, is this in your eyes a form of no follow through. Bad design choice, or just bad all around. I always looked at it more like a style. I understand though in regards to shapes. This one eye breaks the rule of construction and what should be a circle/oval.

The 2 pupils/one eyeball style thing is common in old European comics drawn in a cartoony style (remember that Smurfs started out as a Belgian comic book before getting turned into a series by Hanna-Barbera)

No surprise in "Heathcliff". The original comic used this type of eye on most of the characters. Most of the time the orange cat had half-closed "dot" eyes, but when his eyes was wide open, no matter what, the creator drew an eyeball with two pupils. This trait made it to the Ruby-Spears series, where the character designs were more faithful to the strip it was based on. The DiC version, however, pretty much changed everything.

Mickey Mouse had alien eyes. In Fantasia documentary section they talked about how the artist asked Walt, "can we have pupils within the pupils." They said Mickey's eyes in the colored cartoons were scaring the audiences.

I've been wondering what parts did Preston Blair do on the Sorcerers Apprentice.

probably a French cartoonist took over the Flintstone strip...The DIC Heathcliff had a French Director (Bruno Bianchi, I believe) and all the characters had those kinds of eyes.Weren't you a designer on Heathcliff, John???

Heathcliff has the "honor" of being the last character voiced by Mel Blanc (on both the Ruby-Spears and the DiC series). When I saw the (DiC) series on Fox Family, I thought Heathcliff sounded like Bugs Bunny, and sure enough, he WAS!

Blanc was very expensive to hire, so R/S and DiC must've had extra load in the budget if they hired him to do the voice.

Even Warner Bros. dropped him in many of the 1967-69 "Looney Tunes" (except those that feature Daffy and Speedy, since they're established). Larry Storch was brought in to do most of the voices on the final LT shorts.

It's comic strip shorthand like Dik Browne's or Mort Walker's work. The Smurfs were a French comic first. It's supposed to happen in animation when both eyeballs get big the go into one.Phil deLara drew his Daffy Duck in his comic book that way. The only time Daffy looked in animation the way he did in his comic is when he gets knocked on the head in Riff-Raffy Daffy.

It's comic strip shorthand like Dik Browne's or Mort Walker's work. The Smurfs were a French comic first. It's supposed to happen in animation when both eyeballs get big the go into one.Phil deLara drew his Daffy Duck in his comic book that way. The only time Daffy looked in animation the way he did in his comic is when he gets knocked on the head in Riff-Raffy Daffy.

Well, as far as HB is concerned, I think mono-eye syndrome started with Iwao Takamoto character designs. I'm not sure if it was on the character sheets that way, or if I saw it initially in Scooby Doo. Possibly as early as Frankenstein Jr (who designed that?). Definately part of the scheme by the time of HairBear Bunch and "Wait til your father gets Home" It was in the House Style in the seventies before HB got the Smurfs.

A lot of it had to do with flesh colored eyes. Mister Rubble was the first genetic experiment there, as far as I can tell.

You can see in the Daffy examples that WB used the eye effect to convey anxiety, which kind of makes sense. It probably became a generic signifier for "existentialism" . Scooby Doo, and the rest, just used it arbitrarily, to be "modern" and up to date. That's my theory, anyway.

Managed to finally get on here, wanted to comment but had, had Blogger problems, anyway, my 2 cents-got to finally see what the one eye and two pupils was--the eye with the two pupils inside. That was one thing that which I'd always came to hate about later sixties, seventies cartoons, and 80s too. Well, that and the taking the innocent teenager types as seen in sitocms and ads like Patty Duke Show and dumbing them down into Pebbles Teenage Flinstone [look for mine and other shcathing reviews of THAT 1971 show on IMBD.com. Somewhere under crappy cartoons..]

Glad to see Joe Barbera hated those modern cartoons shows too.

Oh, and JohnK, I loved the way you describe Astro's diction: "he talked like a retard.." LOL. Did you tell anyone at Hanna-Barbera that? :)

Ed Benedict did a great job with female characters like the Jetsons Jane and Judy, unlike certain later versions of them.